“Exactly!” Hodja Nasreddin exclaimed, stepping from the shadows into the light.
Everyone recognized him at once and froze in surprise. The spy turned white. Hodja Nasreddin walked right up to him, while the chaikhana keeper Ali approached unnoticeably from behind, ready to grab the spy at any moment.
“So you are the genuine Hodja Nasreddin?” The spy glanced round, hesitating. His cheeks were trembling, and his eyes were darting. However, he found the strength to respond:
“Yes, I am the genuine, true Hodja Nasreddin, and all the rest are impostors, including you!”
“Muslims, what are you waiting for?” Hodja Nasreddin shouted. “He has confessed it himself! Grab him, hold him, have you not heard the emir’s decree, do you not know what you must do with Hodja Nasreddin? Grab him, or you will answer for harboring him!”
He tore off the spy’s false beard. Everyone in the chaikhana recognized the hated pockmarked face with a flat nose and darting eyes.
“He has confessed!” Hodja Nasreddin cried out, winking to the right. “Seize Hodja Nasreddin!” He winked to the left.
The chaikhana keeper Ali was the first to grab the spy. The latter made to run away, but water-bearers, peasants, and tradesmen quickly got to him. For a time, nothing was visible except for rising and falling fists. Hodja Nasreddin was working harder than anyone else.
“I was joking!” the spy shouted, moaning. “O Muslims, I was joking, I am not Hodja Nasreddin! Let me go!”
“Liar!” Hodja Nasreddin shouted in response, working his fists like a good dough-maker. “You confessed it yourself, we heard it! O Muslims, we are all endlessly devoted to our emir and must fulfill his decrees exactly, so beat this Hodja Nasreddin, o Muslims! Drag him off to the palace and hand him off to the guards! Beat him for the glory of Allah and for the glory of the emir!”
They dragged the spy off to the palace, beating him with tireless zeal along the way. Giving the spy a farewell kick just below the back, Hodja Nasreddin returned to the chaikhana.
“Oof!” he said, wiping off sweat. “It seems we’ve done a fine number on him! I think he’s still getting it, can you hear, Ali?”
Excited voices and the spy’s pitiful cries came from the distance. He had spited everyone, that spy, and today everyone wanted to pay him back under the pretext of the emir’s decree.
Pleased and happy, the chaikhana keeper smirked and patted his belly:
“That’ll teach him. He will never come to my chaikhana again!”
Hodja Nasreddin changed in the back room, attached his beard, and turned once more into Hussein Huslia, the Baghdad sage.
When he arrived at the palace, he heard moans coming from the guards’ quarters. He peeked inside.
The pockmarked spy was lying on a mat, all beat up, swollen, and crumpled, while Arslanbek was standing over him with a torch in his hand.
“Esteemed Arslanbek, what happened?” Hodja Nasreddin asked in an innocent voice.
“A very bad thing, Hussein Huslia. This vagrant Hodja Nasreddin has returned to the city again and already managed to beat up our most skilled spy, who had been passing himself off as Hodja Nasreddin on my orders and pronouncing devout speeches in order to lessen the harmful influence of the real Hodja Nasreddin on the minds of the people. But you can see what happened!”
“Oh, oh!” the spy said, raising his head, which was decorated with bruises and bloodstains. “Never again will I tangle with that accursed vagrant, because the next time, he will kill me. And I do not wish to be a spy any longer. Tomorrow, I will travel somewhere far away, where no one knows me, and take on an honest trade.”
“It seems my friends spared no effort!” Hodja Nasreddin thought, looking at the spy and even feeling a certain pity for him. “If the palace had been another two hundred steps away, they would probably not have delivered him alive. We’ll see if he puts this lesson to good use.”
Sitting by the window of his tower at dawn, Hodja Nasreddin could see the pockmarked spy walk out of the palace gates carrying a small bundle in his hands. Limping sometimes on his right leg and sometimes on his left, clutching his chest, his shoulders, and his sides, and sitting down every other minute to catch his breath, the spy crossed the bazaar square, which was lit up by the first cool rays of the sun, and disappeared in the shade of the covered rows. Morning was coming to replace the dark night – clean, transparent, clear, awash with dew, pierced with sunlight. The birds were clicking, whistling, and twittering; butterflies flew high into the air to warm themselves in the first rays of light; a bee landed on the windowsill in front of Hodja Nasreddin and began to crawl around in search of the smell of honey coming from a ewer near the window.
The sun – Hodja Nasreddin’s ancient, unchanging friend – was rising; they met every morning, and every morning Hodja Nasreddin could rejoice at seeing the sun as if he had not seen it for a whole year. The sun was rising like a kind, generous god, pouring its favors unto all equally, and everything in the world rejoiced gratefully, revealing its beauty, burning, sparkling, and shining in the morning rays – fluffy clouds, minaret tiles, wet leaves, water, grass, flowers. Even a simple, grim stone, forgotten and neglected by nature, found a way to decorate itself for the sun: its cracked sides shone and sparkled as if brushed with diamond dust. How could Hodja Nasreddin remain cool before the face of his shining friend at such an hour? The trees trembled beneath the bright rays of the sun, and Hodja Nasreddin trembled with them, as if he, too, was dressed in green leaves; doves were cooing and cleaning their wings atop a nearby minaret, and Hodja Nasreddin also wanted to clean his wing; two butterflies were fluttering near the window, and he wanted to join their airy game. Hodja Nasreddin’s eyes were shining with joy. He remembered the pockmarked spy and wished for this morning to grant him a new life – clean and spotless. But immediately he thought, with regret, that the soul of that man was so full of nastiness that he probably would not be able to free himself, and, after recovering, would return to his old ways.
As will be revealed later, Hodja Nasreddin was not mistaken in his predictions. He knew people too well to be wrong. But how he wanted to be wrong, how happy he would have been to see the spy’s soul healed! But that which is rotten cannot once again become blooming and fresh, stench cannot turn into fragrance. Hodja Nasreddin sighed dejectedly.
His most cherished dream was a world where all people could live as brothers, without greed, envy, guile, or anger, helping each other in need and sharing the joy of one as the joy of all. But, as he dreamed of such a joyous world, he observed bitterly that people were leading wrongful lives, oppressing and enslaving each other, and desecrating their souls with all kinds of filth. How much time would people need to understand, at last, the laws of a clean and honest life? Hodja Nasreddin did not doubt it in the least that people would one day understand these laws. He believed firmly that there were far more good people in the world than bad; the moneylender Jafar and the pockmarked spy, with their souls rotten to the core, were but ugly exceptions. He believed firmly that nature only endowed man with good, while all the bad in him was a foreign crust, introduced to the human soul from the outside by a wrongful, unjust order of things. He believed firmly that a time would come when people would rebuild and clean up their lives, cleansing their souls of all dirt in the course of this noble work… The fact that Hodja Nasreddin thought this way, and not some other way, is proven by the numerous stories that bear the stamp of his soul, including this book. And while many have tried to blacken his memory out of greed, or lowly envy, or malice, they did not succeed in their endeavors, for lies will never triumph over truth. The memory of Hodja Nasreddin has remained, and will forever remain, noble and clear, preserving its transparent glow like a diamond, forever and in spite of everything! And, to this day, when travelers stop by a modest headstone in the Turkish Ak-Shekir, they speak fondly of Hodja Nasreddin, the merry tramp from Bukhara, and repeat the words of a certain poet: “He gave his heart to the earth, even though he circled the world like the wind – like the wind, which, after his death, spread the fragrance of the blooming roses of his soul throughout the universe. Glorious is the life spent on leaving the stamp of one’s soul on the world and on contemplating all the world’s beauties!”